Mostly About Organized Crime

10/22/2016

Organized crime steals art work not to appreciate its aesthetic value but to use it as a cash substitute in underworld transactions.

In commenting on the sophisticated heist last week of several paintings from a Quebec home, Alain Lacoursière, a former detective with the Montreal police who specialized in recovering stolen artwork, said "valuable stolen paintings often end up in the hands of organized crime figures even if they can never be hung on a wall and appreciated for their beauty" as reported by The Gazette:

"To people in organized crime, they represent 20 per cent of the cash value of the painting. They are easy to transport and they are easy to get across a border," he said, adding he has seen cases where expensive paintings ended up in Russia or Colombia and were used to purchase drugs from drug traffickers based in those countries. "The artwork remains a form of currency throughout. They remain hidden away in a closet. It's not like in the movies, where some guy who really appreciates art has a secret room in his mansion (where he displays it). I have never seen that in my entire career."

Two paintings stolen fourteen years ago from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam were recovered last month by Italian police during a raid against the cocaine-trafficking Amato-Pagano clan from the Camorra or Neapolitan Mafia as reported by The New York Times: "the Italian culture minister, Dario Franceschini, said in a statement on Friday that the investigation 'confirmed how much criminal organizations are interested in works of art, which are used as a form of investment as well as a front of financing.'"

10/18/2016

Hillary Clinton "swiped State Department furniture to decorate her Washington home, a former member of her security detail has alleged to the FBI" as reported by the New York Post:

"Early in Clinton's tenure as secretary of state, she and her staff were observed removing lamps and furniture from the State Department which were transported to her residence in Washington, DC," an agent on the detail told the FBI. The agent "does not know whether these items were ever returned to the government," according to FBI notes.

This isn't the first time Hillary pilfered government property.

In their 2001 departure from the Oval Office Bill and Hillary pulled a Bonnie and Clyde in shipping "White House furniture to the Clintons' newly purchased home in New York . . . despite questions at the time by the White House chief usher about whether they were entitled to remove the items" as reported by the Los Angeles Times. After being called out for the apparent theft the Clintons claimed a staffer mistakenly had listed the items as personal gifts to the First Couple as reported by The Washington Post:

Hillary Clinton spokesman Jim Kennedy said that the Clintons had thought the furniture did belong to them because the items had been listed by the White House gifts office as "gifts to the Clintons that they could keep or leave behind." This latter claim is more than just the reflexive Clinton response of blaming the help. It is about intent. If the Clintons knew the furniture belonged to the government but took it anyway, that could be adjudged to be "criminal conversion" -- you know, um, stealing. If they thought it was theirs, they are innocent of criminal intent. Well, of course they should be accorded the benefit of the doubt. And yet, it does seem odd.

06/20/2013

Fifteen suspected interloping mobsters from Russia and Georgia have been rounded up on a variety of charges including murder, theft, extortion, money laundering, corruption and document forgery as reported by adnkronos. What?! No drug charges?! What kind of self-respecting alleged mobsters are these guys?!

05/22/2013

Edward MacKenzie, Jr. once provided muscle for mob boss Whitey Bulger, and later became the operations director for a Boston church. However, he apparently couldn't understand that collections in a church wasn't quite the same as collections on the street.

The feds have charged MacKenzie with racketeering for allegedly "systematically loot[ing] the church of its considerable financial
assets through a combination of fraud, deceit, extortion, theft and
bribery" as reported by The Associated Press.